We are not born from nothing.
“The psyche is not of today” Jung reminds us.
It is ancient.
It stretches back millions of years:
evolving, adapting, accumulating experience, myth, instinct, and memory.
What we call “individual consciousness”
our thoughts, feelings, preferences, dreams
is only the visible part.
A flower, a fruit. Brief. Seasonal.
But beneath it lies a vast, perennial root system:
the collective unconscious.
The archetypal ground.
Our archetypal ground.
Most modern minds make their plans as if we are self-created.
As if we begin with ourselves and end with what we want.
Jung invites us to a deeper truth:
We are not the source.
We are expressions of it.
New experimental expressions.
To understand ourselves more fully
our desires, symptoms, compulsions, creative impulses
we must learn to reckon with the “rhizome beneath the earth”.
The unconscious layers.
The patterns behind the patterns.
What dreams reveal. What myths enact.
What images stir in us something older than words.
It’s about rooting the present in the past.
About recognizing that the Self is not like us, a momentary flicker,
but a continuation of something eternal.
When we ignore the rhizome, we mistake the flower for the plant.
When we remember, the psyche night open again like a living symbol.
And it shows us the way.
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